Origin of Black Hole Term




Name: Sabrina
Status: educator
Grade: 6-8
Location: TX

Question: My students are researching the origins of various astronomical 
theories and we have hit a snag with the concept of black holes. Where was 
this concept first coined? Any history of the theory of how black holes 
developed would be greatly appreciated.
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Two centuries ago, the English geologist John Michell realized that it would 
be theoretically possible for gravity to be so overwhelmingly strong that 
nothing -- not even light traveling at 186,000 miles an hour -- could escape. 
To generate such gravity, an object would have to be very massive and 
unimaginably dense. At the time, the necessary conditions for "dark stars" 
(as Michell called them) seemed physically impossible. His ideas were published 
by the French mathematician and philosopher Pierre Simon Laplace in two 
successive editions of an astronomy guide, but were dropped from the third 
edition.

In 1916, the concept was revived when German astrophysicist Karl Schwarzschild 
decided to compute the gravitational fields of stars using Einstein's new field 
equation. Schwarzschild limited the complexity of the problem by assuming the 
star was perfectly spherical, gravitationally collapsed, and did not rotate. 
His calculations yielded a solution aptly called a Schwarzschild singularity. 

Scientists theorize that a singularity lies at the center of a black hole, a 
catchy term physicist John Wheeler coined in the 1960s. Since then, black holes 
have caught the public imagination. 

Excerpted from:
http://archive.ncsa.uiuc.edu/Cyberia/NumRel/BlackHoleHistory.html 

Nate Unterman
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